Either Super Organized And Tidy Or Messy.

Page 3 of 3 [ 40 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2, 3

Something Profound
Snowy Owl
Snowy Owl

Joined: 23 Apr 2021
Age: 41
Gender: Male
Posts: 131
Location: New Mexico

09 Aug 2021, 1:28 am

I tend to be disorganized/messy, but agree that when I do decide to clean things it is an "All or Nothing" endeavor. I tend to go on a super frenetic cleaning frenzy every now and again and get things to a super clean state. But then I tend to leave it alone until it returns to the disorganized mess.

never occurred to me that this may be due to ASD. Interesting thing to consider.



Dear_one
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 2 Feb 2008
Age: 76
Gender: Male
Posts: 5,721
Location: Where the Great Plains meet the Northern Pines

09 Aug 2021, 2:37 am

I don't think I've ever had my whole place organized at once. If it is tarted up for guests, there will be "miscellaneous" piles out of the way. If one or two rooms are really well squared away, they will not be so fresh by the others are done. I only get concerned when the shop projects start encroaching on the living area after the work is done.
I've made pictures that I expected to be like those in magazines, and then noticed odd things out of place. Spaces that are truly tidy seem lifeless to me. I remember a reference to "the Hollywood glitterati, and their palatial, bookless houses" and it seemed ever so bleak. I knew a ship's captain who, when at home, felt afraid to put a magazine down beside his chair.
I heard of one U prof whose desk was a 4 X 8' sheet of plywood. When it got too covered with papers, and/or a new project began, he'd just cover it with a fresh sheet. Several generations were fairly easy to access by using pulleys to raise individual panels in order.



JustFoundHere
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 13 Jan 2018
Age: 61
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,152
Location: California

22 Aug 2021, 6:18 pm

It's been a few weeks since I set the guideline (a rough guideline at that) to clean-up my sink on 'even numbered dates.' My sink has never been cleaner!

Can odd/even numbered date schedules be extended and applied to laundry days?

More often than not, I have to drag myself :lol: "kicking and screaming" :lol: to get things done!



auntblabby
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 12 Feb 2010
Gender: Male
Posts: 114,586
Location: the island of defective toy santas

22 Aug 2021, 6:38 pm

sis helped me clean up much more of my tin can, now all the floors ['cept for bedrooms] are clear and clean! i feel almost normal now. ;) i still have to clear off the kitchen table [where i normally would be typing this stuff] as it is piled high with stuff, as well as the living room couch which you can't really recognize as a couch as it has so much stuff on it. and the bathroom is still a mess with no visible horizontal platform beside the sink. toilet needs cleaning also. :eew:



JustFoundHere
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 13 Jan 2018
Age: 61
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,152
Location: California

23 Aug 2021, 3:19 pm

ASPartOfMe wrote:
This is a form of executive dysfunction common among autistics.
It seems like a combination of hyper-focus, perfectionism, and difficulty with multitasking all common autistic traits.

Autistics tend to like order and consistency and do hyperfocus. When you hypefocus on cleaning you have a need to do it exactly right because that is the way it is supposed to be.

Once you have gotten the cleaning right you hyperfocus on something else and forget about cleaning up.

Your mind going blank might be a sign of autistic shutdown. This happens like other shutdowns where when one gets overwhelmed ones brain takes an involuntary break. We have to multitask in life more than we realize. If you have poor multitasking skills you will get burnout quicker then the person more skilled. Adding to the overstimulation of your brain may be sensory sensitivities another common autistic trait.


Oh Yes, order, consistency, and distractions - the dichotomy of the Autism Spectrum. Difficulties with executive- functioning become apparent with those mundane tasks - such as housekeeping.

Personally, I have found that scheduling kitchen, and sink cleaning on based-on odd/even calendar days has provided that "ice-breaker of sorts." After only a few short weeks of being mindful of odd/even dates, my sink has never been cleaner!

The takeaway here is that odd/even dates introduces that concrete standard (order, consistency) which yield an incentive of sorts to follow-through on routine tasks.

I'm considering extending an odd/even standard to schedule such tasks as laundry!



Dear_one
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 2 Feb 2008
Age: 76
Gender: Male
Posts: 5,721
Location: Where the Great Plains meet the Northern Pines

23 Aug 2021, 3:29 pm

I am currently building some more shelves, to receive some clutter from the floor. Seasonal boxes have been a problem, making cleaning difficult. However, I made the effort to move them around when the friend who cleaned my carpet was coming back and I needed to vacuum. Now, I'm doing the hard floors and counters in anticipation of another guest.



Dear_one
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 2 Feb 2008
Age: 76
Gender: Male
Posts: 5,721
Location: Where the Great Plains meet the Northern Pines

25 Aug 2021, 1:26 pm

My place is cleaner and tidier than it has been in months, and I like the look. When I've been really depressed, even taking down a cloud of cobwebs hasn't cheered me up. I had a friend who would gauge her depression by how many dishes she had in her sink on average.
Anyway, I noticed that once I was getting close to done, it became like a solitaire game, when you are about to win and have a use for any new card that appears. Now, it is easy to restore and even improve, without a big backlog making it hopeless to finish in a day. I hope it does not regress too much as I tackle more rooms.
The next challenge is to start thinning my possessions. I should toss things I have not used for years, but too often, I have thought of a use for things I'd forgotten about the next day. I once carefully considered an incomplete set of parts and did dispose of them, about a year before winding up with the other part of the set a year later.



ToughDiamond
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 15 Sep 2008
Age: 72
Gender: Male
Posts: 12,163

25 Aug 2021, 2:45 pm

Dear_one wrote:
My place is cleaner and tidier than it has been in months, and I like the look. When I've been really depressed, even taking down a cloud of cobwebs hasn't cheered me up. I had a friend who would gauge her depression by how many dishes she had in her sink on average.
Anyway, I noticed that once I was getting close to done, it became like a solitaire game, when you are about to win and have a use for any new card that appears. Now, it is easy to restore and even improve, without a big backlog making it hopeless to finish in a day. I hope it does not regress too much as I tackle more rooms.
The next challenge is to start thinning my possessions. I should toss things I have not used for years, but too often, I have thought of a use for things I'd forgotten about the next day. I once carefully considered an incomplete set of parts and did dispose of them, about a year before winding up with the other part of the set a year later.

Taking down the cloud of cobwebs didn't lift your depression? I've read, and some of my experiences seem to back it up, that if you're feeling down then it's sometimes possible to adopt an attitude of "well if I'm going to be miserable then I may as well accept it and do a job that's full of misery," e.g. tackle a boring tidy-up job. The idea is that once you've got a nice result, you'll feel better. But I suppose, like most tips, it has its limitations, and sometimes the bad mood is too strong for the fix to work. I suspect it works for me because my down moods are very rarely all that strong, and because a lot of my feelings of self-worth and happiness come from seeing myself as somebody who has purpose, as somebody who does things, so if I can just achieve something and reinforce that self-image, it can be quite a good tonic.

With tidying generally, I find it useful to ignore the end goal if it seems a distant thing. It's not always easy to do that, but if I focus on a bite-sized subtask then I can often avoid the demoralising feeling of "it'll never be done at this rate." It kind of suits my Aspie brain because when I focus on a subtask, I really focus on it, and become almost completely blind to anything else. Again the fix has its limitations - I don't think I'll ever be 100% free of a nagging sense of "you should be doing something else, you're going too slow, you'll never complete the overall mission at this rate," but as long as I occasionally consider the big picture and make reasonably sure that it won't do much harm to let myself go for a while, it's a bearable feeling. And when it comes to tidying up, I think it's important to forgive myself for not turning my home into a perfectly neat palace. Any improvement is a feather in my cap, and I think it's better to focus on how much worse it used to be than how much better it should be but probably won't ever be. There's a saying from Zen, "Now I've given up all hope, I feel much better."